psp

[Christian Doran] wanted some blinky goodness to go along with the tunes on his PSP. He built a VU meter circuit around a couple of LM324 op-amp chips and fit it into the UMD space on the back of the PSP. Using surface mount LEDs and some fine wire he lined up a string of indicator lights round the circle on the clear UMD cover. As you can see in the video after the break, the back of the case now pulses along with the music.

Friends are constantly giving us their old electronics. We love it because our junk box is a never-ending pile of possibilities. We’re really starting to amass a collection of LCD screens that are not easily interfaced and this project gives us some hope for the future. [Philip] has been posting about using an FPGA as a driver for a replacement PSP LCD screen.

Many projects source cell phone LCD screens that have their own driver chip that can be addressed over SPI for use with a simple microcontroller. More complicated screens need a more involved control scheme and this is where the Field Programmable Gate Array takes over. [Philip] lays out the steps he’s using to implement his controller, from setting up the correct voltage levels, to planning for coordinate addressing, and even some of his follies with reverse current. We think this would be a great way to introduce yourself to FPGA projects.

[JoblessPunk] recently finished his what-a-psp-should-be mod. He’s internalized a camera and added a switch in the body to toggle between using the camera or using the USB port. There’s an additional analog stick, and added charging functionality via the USB port. He’s also packed in an additional 32 GB of flash memory. The device is of course running custom firmware which facilitates the ubiquitous flock of emulators and homebrew apps.

We agree that the original PSP is a pretty powerful handheld that never saw a full realization of its potential. With the impending release of the next generation PSP Go we hope the price and availability of the older units leads to more mods of this sort. Check out the video after the break. Continue reading “PSP plus second stick, camera, 32 gigs”→

[Folklord36] on the Acidmods.com forums has been working on a PSP laptop that we think gives the PSP GO a run for it’s money. Sure it may be a bit bulkier but it has a full keyboard, thanks to an Xbox chat pad. The original psp is on the bottom. The screen and speakers have been moved to the top. He says there are still a lot of things that need to be finished, but this is pretty impressive already.

Engadget has video from the June 2009 episode of Qore that shows the new PSP Go. It has a slide out gamepad, 16GB internal storage, bluetooth, and a memory slot of some sort. We’re naturally curious about its potential as a homebrew platform. Will Sony take the mature route they did with the PS3 and let you run Linux or will they continue the firmware arms race the PSP is known for? We’ll be hearing more about this platform at E3 next week.

PSP firmware 5.03 has been hacked by Team Typhoon. This allows you to run custom code on the PSP by taking advantage of the tiff exploit. You’ll have to wait to download the hack though, they haven’t released it yet. This means those of you still on 5.02 or still using the little blue tool will be able to upgrade soon.